Canadians are far happier with their Olympic television experience than Americans, according to an analysis of Twitter comments in the early days of the London Games.

Ottawa-based media monitoring company MediaMiser found 50 percent of the tweets referencing CTV - the main broadcaster in Canada’s Olympic Consortium – were positive in the first three days of competition. The rest were negative (28 per cent) or neutral (22 per cent).

The network has made an unprecedented amount of coverage available to its viewers, with more than 5,000 hours available on televisions, phones, tablets and computers.

That
stands in sharp contrast to NBC, the largest broadcaster in the United States
and sole rights holder in that country. It has faced harsh criticism for its
decision to run the Games on tape delay so it can have them on during prime
time, although it is allowing viewers to stream the Games online in real time.

NBC-related
Tweets have been 83 per cent negative, 11 per cent neutral and 6 per cent
positive.

MediaMiser
analyzed tweets that were sent with the hashtags #London2012, #olympics or
#olympics 2012. It then sorted the 50,000 tweets that came back into two
streams – one for CTV and one for NBC.

The
company’s software is able to determine tone, after some lessons from a human.

“Our
auto-toning engine uses human guidance and machine learning to learn which
tweets are positive, neutral and negative about a given topic,” spokesman Jim
Donnelly said. “The engine is first ‘trained’ by a human and then deployed as
tweets are collected.”

The company deliberately avoided any tweets that were tagged #NBCfail, which has gained prominence in the last few days as viewers vent their frustration at the network's missteps. It felt including them would skew the results because the users were biased.

elizabethCorrection - I should have said rowing, not sculls.2012-08-02T17:59:16.958Z

elizabethOh, get off the U.S. CTV is fine but who's the pathetic commentator for sculls spewing out prayers platitudes - pathetic and COXWAIN is pronounced COCKS'N in...Oh, get off the U.S. CTV is fine but who's the pathetic commentator for sculls spewing out prayers platitudes - pathetic and COXWAIN is pronounced COCKS'N in EVERY COUNTRY. Where are you from?? more2012-08-02T16:59:21.724Z